Archive for ‘August, 2016’

An epic scale narrative of Australian history from master filmmaker Charles Chauvel, Heritage spans the earliest days of white settlement in 1788 across some fifty years to the 1930s.
James Morrison (Franklyn Bennett), a dashing and ambitious young settler in the new colony at Sydney Cove, woos Biddy O’Shea (Peggy Maquire), a fiery young Irish girl, when she arrives in Sydney on 'the wife ship’, but fate intervenes and they both marry other people. A few years later, Morrison and his team of bullock drivers intervene to stop a band of Aborigines attacking a farmhouse. Biddy, mortally wounded by a spear, asks him to care for her baby. Morrison and his wife Jane (Margot Rhys) raise the boy, Frank Parry, as their own. Several generations later, Biddy’s great granddaughter and namesake marries the great grandson of James Morrison, now a member of the Federal Parliament.

An analysis of the style and vision of Abbas Kiarostami, the world’s most iconic Iranian filmmaker, through the lens of his earliest work, including his first short film (Bread & Alley, 1970) and, particularly, his first feature, The Report. This early example of Kiarostami’s work gives insight into his poetic, humanistic tendencies, combining allegorical storytelling with a documentary, neo-realist sensibility, and often exploring the very nature of film as fiction, that have pervaded his work ever since, including such recent international sensations as A Taste of Cherry and Certified Copy. Exclusive interviews with film critics, historians and scholars (including the late great Andrew Sarris) and those directly involved in the making of The Report provide a look at how the career of this master independent auteur began and was shaped.

A well-handled slice of British realism from the producing/directing team of Michael Relph and Basil Dearden, as detective Stanley Baker hunts for an arsonist. Its semi-documentary style and good location shots of the Liverpool slums lend an air of authority to proceedings. The story may be predictable, but it’s well-paced and builds up to a tense climax.

Set in Liverpool. Detective Sgt. Jack Truman (Stanley Baker) is unsuccessfully investigating an outbreak of arson by a perpetrator dubbed ‘Firefly’, when he is reluctantly transferred to the job of juvenile liaison officer in a depressed area. After picking up two young delinquent children for shoplifting, he falls in love with their elder sister Catherine Murphy (Anne Heywood), and becomes suspicious of her young brother Johnnie (David McCallum) – the leader of a local gang...

In this classic slapstick romance, Lucille Ball plays a "helpful" wife who constantly meddles in her husband's business. Some of her follies include weird potions, including a hair restorer that grows way too much hair. Ball and Tone work well as a comic team and the madcap script make this film a laugh riot.

Set in wartime Poland, the film involves the secret Nazi missile installation at Peenemunde.
Polish school teacher Stefan (Michael Rennie) is assigned by the Nazis to work at a labor camp. He's recruited by the Polish resistance to be their inside man. Tadek (David Knight), Stefan's watchmaker friend, works with him. They discover the Germans are secretly building a rocket. The partisan spying leads to the blowing up of the factory where the rocket is built. The second part of the spying mission calls for them to get a photo of the rocket for British intelligence. The efforts of the resistance enables, in 1943, the Brits to stage a raid at the site and transport a rocket back to England.